“Next May, Trent Reznor turns 50. ‘It’s with some sense of dread,’ he says dryly,” Joe Levy reports for Billboard. “During his time on the road, Apple finalized its Beats acquisition for an estimated $3 billion. Reznor was chief creative officer of the Beats Music streaming service, and when he returned home to Los Angeles, Apple was interested in tapping his creative energy”
“‘That’s flattering, as a life-long Apple consumer and fan and advocate,’ says Reznor, who studied computer engineering during his three semesters in college and has long wrestled with the difficulties of music in the digital age,” Levy reports. “‘I am on the side of streaming music, and I think the right streaming service could solve everybody’s problems,’ says Reznor… ‘Ownership is waning. Everybody is comfortable with the cloud — your documents, who knows where they are? They are there when you need them. That idea that I’ve got my records on the shelf doesn’t feel as important even to me as it used to. I just think we haven’t quite hit the right formula yet.'”
You’re working with Apple. Is this an evolution of your Beats role?
Reznor: It’s related to that. Beats was bought by Apple, and they expressed direct interest in me designing some products with them. I can’t go into details, but I feel like I’m in a unique position where I could be of benefit to them. That does mean some compromises in terms of how much brain power goes toward music and creating. This is very creative work that’s not directly making music, but it’s around music.
Is it about music delivery?
Reznor: It’s in that world. It’s exciting to me, and I think it could have a big enough impact that it’s worth the effort. I’m fully in it right now, and it’s challenging, and it’s unfamiliar and it’s kind of everything I asked for — and the bad thing is it’s everything I asked for.
Much more, including Rezonr’s thoughts on U2’s iTunes giveaway, in the full article here.
NIИ
😀
I want to own my music! I listen only to stuff that’s worth owning. I don’t listen to much pop music.
Me too. I guess we are old and set in our ways.
So how do you listen to music in order to know what you like and what you want to buy? Commercial radio?
Lots of sources out there. itunes sampling, allmusic.com, metacritic.com, NPR iphone app, youtube.com, spotify, many, many others…..
You can also do searches for similar bands.
Tons of sites out there that list bands that are similar to a band you are looking for.
I don’t care to stream music either, would rather have it myself.
But i’ll turn on iTunes radio from time to time and enter a song from a band as the starting point and set it to discover, mainly turn the radio off after a few songs.. and skipping a lot as well.
Gives me a few new ideas.
Always liked Dream theater, used them as a start.. A song by Animals as Leaders came up… SOLD. Exactly what I was looking for.
“Singers” anymore tend to ruin pretty much every song anymore. Very few bands that work good and sound good to me (remember, to ME… everyone has different tastes)
Or grow up in the sixties…
Concerts, friends, public radio. There are lots of things out there. Internet radio has some fine programming.
I believe if you can’t whistle it, it’s not music.
Try whistling rap stuff.
They should come out with a pro product, High end audio/video or such
A few related things.
Until recently, I felt like I had little use for streaming. I almost always buy and play my own music. Now I find that occasionally, I will go to Spotify and stream old albums I used to own on vinyl or cassette but sold years ago. I just use the free service, but it’s still great to listen to things I’d given up hope of ever hearing again… and for free.
I subscribed to Apple’s iTunes Match, and when I use it, I find that I frequently re-discover albums and artists that I had neglected because I only have a 16 gig iPhone.
For those looking to discover new music, Minnesota Public Radio has a really good, diverse, commercial free station called The Current. There’s an MPR app, too.
Trent Reznor is a god.
These super cheap Panasonic earbuds have better sound than many earphones over $50.00. I bought sets for my whole family last year, and I’m still impressed by how good music sounds through them. I often hear details I had never noticed even with Apple’s EarPods. Currently on sale for 13.99 directly from Panasonic.
Panasonic RP-TCM125-K
I think I speak for the majority of people with taste that we would not have returned a free Trent Rezor album that appeared on our iPhones.
I would have been happy.
Trent’s known to have given away his stuff before anyway.
This “project” isn’t exactly a “secret.”
I love Reznor as a musician, but “everyone’s comfortable with the cloud?” That’s just out-of-touch.
I’m comfortable with putting unimportant files in-the-clear in the cloud. I’m comfortable putting my IMPORTANT files into a strongly encrypted disk image in the cloud. I’m comfortable putting anything at all into a client-side encrypted cloud account. I do all three of the above and manage to keep track of what’s what. That’s comforting.
Apple was genius the way they conceived a company called Beats and eventually bought them.
(my pet theory)
They even named it after a vegetable just for fun, to parallel Apple. Beets.
This is way too easy. And I actually suspect it’s all true.
As someone from the vinyl age (the first one!), I enjoy buying, owning and carrying around MY music with me. I am never going to get the concept of music belonging to someone else and I have to pay Pay PAY to merely rent the ability to access it. For me, that’s not going to happen.
HOWEVER: I absolutely LOVE being able to listen to new music via the net in order to hear stuff I’ll never hear on WORTHLESS/CRAP/AWFUL/INDUSTRIAL radio (from hell). Let me pick what tunes I want to hear. Let me decide what I like (versus what some industrialist dickhead suite wants to shove in my ears). Once I find music I like, I want to buy it, own it, and do what I like with it within the scope of my own personal uses. IOW: NO DRM infestation, thank you.
I’d appreciate it if visual media was similarly uninfested with DRM crap, because I again want to use it as I like for my own personal uses, thank you.
I swear I spelled it ‘suit’, not ‘suite’! I must be possessed by a bad spelling daemon today. Or I need my COFFEE!